Posts by Wellyboot

The teen Bill Gates has answers to the AI-pocalypse the 70-year-old Gates has forgotten

All those previous changes took decades to fully implement, AI is ripping up the old system far too quickly for alternatives that will gainfully employ millions to appear.

A cloud engineer walked into a bar and – no joke – ended up having to migrate a datacenter

Re: I've consulted on projects to do this a few times

As with the chip makers the ongoing R&D* required for data centre kit is the biggest contributor to ticket price, combine this with the obvious fact that build numbers are several orders of magnitude lower multiplying out the effect and there's quite a bit of leeway available for big 'repeat' customers.

*including the production facilities.

'Uber rapture' leaves passengers and drivers behind in Nigeria and Uganda

Re: Magrathea

I'd like to think the respective governments would look at the disruption caused and basically just ban Uber.

>>>Uber remains deeply committed to sub-Saharan Africa<<< Until it isn't..

It's an opportunity for all the drivers to set up a co-operative* and continue working, they only need new software to allocate nearby vehicles and implement a simplified fare structure.

LibreOffice 26.8 is out – local first, and with no AI

Re: "Professional Typography"?

Manually fixing kerning in LO as requirement to avoid AI & cloud is absolutely worth it.

Security vets rally around $4 paper password books for sale in Australia

Re: Simple is nice :)

Modem & fax require a POTS line at both ends, getting rare these days

A good old acoustic coupler can probably ramp up to a reasonable bit rate these days.

Re: password as the first n characters of a certain page of your chosen book.

All the AI has probably already got a copy scanned, copyright what's that!

Capita handed vital role in next pandemic despite civil service pension failures

Re: In later news

Lessons HAVE been learned, the next bribe donation will be bigger.

$1K laser mosquito zapper promises precision strikes as backers itch for answers

Re: Can i just be (surprisingly) the first to say...

They come in such pretty colours

Trump sends the US Navy back to the steam age

Re: What's wrong with banks of oarsmen ?

Yes, the nuclear sub fleet is steam powered, just using spicey hot metal instead of oil or coal as fuel.

Oil fired steam turbines (on ships) were still in Royal Navy use into the 1990s on HMS Bristol, she had both steam & gas turbines (COSAG)

Re: Hawkeye is important

The first take off afterwards, no cargo, minimal fuel, carrier going flat out into the wind was a real squeaky bum moment.

Re: Hawkeye is important

Helicopter AEW is a 80% good enough system, it goes up high and can see a long way.

The UK will eventually put radar on drones designed for STOL operations from the very long deck the QEs have and then refuel them in flight from other drones.

Re: Very wierd design choice

The Navy may well have preferred 3 or 4* 50,000 ton carriers instead but the treasury only allowed the Navy to build two carriers, so they went as big as possible while still fitting through the dry dock gates.

These ships have a 50 year design life, by the time they’re scrapped many things that are sci-fi now will be common place in the way pocket sized computers with global video conferencing facilities were pure sci-fi in 1976. Home 3D printers may well have moved on from printing plastic ornaments to full function electronic devices in 50 years.

Propulsion and material technology also may have rendered catapults obsolete by 2076, I'd go as far as saying there's a non zero chance of transforming robots that can fly, drive or walk depending on the circumstances (size TBD).

*Pretty much guaranteeing 1 or 2 are always ready to go and more UK yards are able to work on them.

Be a hater all you want, AI's here to stay

Will the kids be wondering this while being handed fries by a robot?

Amsterdam activists throw acid at Microsoft datacenter project

The European public get as much say in the actions of Isreal as they do in the actions of the USA, Russia, China and anywhere else - naff all.

Does he count as a game bird?

The old quote stands : "Democracy is the worst form of government, other than all the others that have been tried"

I didn't say anything about MS, merely making a general point about democracy in general.

It's legal to build a building in Belgium, Belgian planning authorities exist, There is a process for objecting to proposed building plans.

Re: High test vinegar

40%* solution Acetic acid is available via the big river advertised for perfect for general cleaning*.

There are not many domestic uses at that strength and I agree that anything that will stay in a balloon long enough to be thrown at a building site isn't going to worry the concrete.

* PPE required here is more than a pair of marigolds.

Democracy is undermined by anyone who reverts to violent actions just because they don't like what other people are doing legally.

Met Police boss threatens to cut 700 frontline jobs after Palantir deal blocked

Re: This is good news.

Was it found by using both hands?

Large scale pilot in 10 forces

AKA rolling out half baked ideas without proper testing.

Question from the defence barrister "Constable plod, how many times did you run the information through AI before it arrived at these results?"

Anthropic recruits army to sell Claude to nonprofits

Re: The "King" is in the altogether

And the increase in thieving costs less than the saved staff wages.

Novo Nordisk reports cyberattack as UK gives Wegovy pill the nod

Re: Promo deal

That'd be the tapeworm egg - and it's 100% natural

KPMG's AI report becomes an accidental demo of AI hallucinations

Lazy report writers

query - Create a report showing the benefits of agentic AI, a report duly arrives and doesn't get checked before publication.

The "and DON'T MAKE S**T up" should really be a default.

UK Typhoon jets fitted with bargain-bin drone busters for Middle East sorties

Yes the Typhoon fleet has been burning through airframe hours at a merry pace in various places in recent years and they have to survive until at least the mid 2030s, The old RAF Tornados used their airframe life up during the Afgan war while Germany & Italys fleets are still plodding on.

A fast prop aircraft (300-400mph) while being ideal for the intercept would have issues with quickly covering the distance between incoming drones, this is the main reason so many fighter airfields were scattered across the south of england in 1940 it take significant amounts of time to move about (minutes matter).

Two seat jet powered advanced training aircraft would be ideal, they have a high subsonic/transonic speed and the hardpoints to mount weapons & counter measures.

Russian drones mounting an air-2-air missile* have already been seen (and shot down) in Ukraine, these are not for dogfighting but if it's following a few miles behind the 'strike' drones it would be a nasty surprise for any pilot who gets spotted by the the seeker head.

* https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/russia-shahed-r60-air-to-air-missile/

Broadcom finds a VMware customer willing to stick around: London Stock Exchange

TBH I think the LSEG will need most of the 5 years to plan & migrate anything they have on VM, They've been an infrastructure niche case for decades.

Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault that they can't

>>>current administration and its party cannot extrapolate basic reasoning in any decision<<<

So true at any point in recent decades for almost anywhere.

Re: but VPNs with a different purpose

The majority of register denizens would consider most politicos to be dumb enough to try banning anthing.

Linus Torvalds says AI-powered bug hunters have made Linux security mailing list ‘almost entirely unmanageable’

Re: Intelligent? tools

The people creating the AI request or checking the results is the most important part of the process, I have a far better set of chisels than Michelangelo ever saw but I'm 100% sure I'd only be wasting a nice lump of marble if I tried to create a statue.

AI will soon be capable of telling convincing lies

Re: The worst of human intelligence?

I think you may be labouring under the impression that AI development is for the benefit of all humanity and not just the tech bro owners.

He who pays the piper, calls the tune...

Meta fights Ofcom over how many billions count as billions

Re: If Meta wants to be fined on their UK revenues

I'm not aware of any Meta involvement in running critical UK infrastructure, so until fines are paid OFCOM could just outright ban them. Many politicos would trample each other to climb onto that bandwagon (Billions more cash for the government).

Meta Zuck would have to choose between a massive* one-off fine or the loss of all the ongoing UK revenue. This would be an 'encouraging others' event for lots of countries with similar legislation.

* relative to most fines, but only a fraction of this years Meta AI cash burn.

Meta U-turns on encryption push for Instagram as DMs go plaintext

Given Excuse - Think of the children

Actual Reason - Feeding the AI

Age checks could turn internet into an ID checkpoint, complains Proton CEO

Re: He understated the problem

Indeed parents should be able to exercise judgement, I was allowed almost unrestricted access to armoured vehicles* on many occasions before the UK age of criminal responsibility, though after I could reach the pedals there was always a 'minder' about for some bizarre reason!

*with quite large guns installed.

Re: Not the internet

You don't have to be communist to think Elon is a <insert multiple expletives here>. Like all the tech Bros. he just doesn't care about other peoples opinions.

His companies however do employ an awful lot of people doing good things and that's important.

Trump to UK: Stop taxing our big beautiful tech corps or face tariff tsunami

Re: cut your involvement with people like that

By providing cover for Seabee Bulldozers!

Recovering several thousand tons of dirt and some little flags on sticks to the US.

Re: Heard and McDonald Islands

The oil is real, but while Argentina is claiming everything belongs to them no company will risk the massive upfront cost of drilling in waters which are at least as nasty as the North sea.

Magnificent irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs

Re: Keyloggers???!!!

personal stuff is done on the mobile phone. !!!!

Swapping Meta snooping for Google snooping.

NASA Inspector fears new spacesuits won’t be ready for Moon landing

Re: In the spirit of international cooperation (yeah as if this will happen)

Now now, stop using common sense to prevent an easily foreseeable problem.

Re: robots

That's engineering / scientific reason for using robots for the last half century, easier, cheaper and safer.

The political reason for putting humans on the moon is to make the point "Our people are there with boots on the ground", quite literally skin in the game because humans in general don't regard 'things' anywhere near as important as humans.

Re: spacesuits won’t be ready for Moon landing

Basically there was no expected scenario where an explosion involving the O2 tanks would leave the spacecraft in any way operational. (as opposed to confetti).

The Apollo 13 filter issue was that the two man Lunar module filters were having to support three astronauts for most of the round trip and the LM/suit filters carried were just not up to that length of mission.

It was a trade-off made with launch mass & physical space requirements being in mind.

WorldCoin's newest pitch: Scan your eyeballs to prove AI agents really represent you

Re: A secure token

By next year AI images generated from billions of 50+megabit selfies will be good enough to fool any bio recognition software

Royal Navy races to arm ships against drone threat

Re: You owe me a new keyboard!

Yes for a small number of drones attacking at the same time, currently the relatively low cost of drones allows the ability to send enough to simply overload the defences.

The short term fix is to repeat the WW2 anti kamikaze tactics - quite literally filling any spare deck space with small auto-cannon* capable of firing proximity fused shells with multiple ships able to cover each other, it's the 'multiple ship' bit that the royal Navy isn't going to fix anytime soon.

*The Type-31 frigates under construction have one (forward) 57mm & two (one at each end) 40mm auto-cannon, a safer mix to account for system failures would be two & six giving multiple barrel coverage of any approach angle.

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

Re: "Which of your bêtes noires did we miss?"

Many white goods manufacturers were still making reasonably well made and repairable items back then, our 2002 Miele has seen three sprog from nappies, through school (two runs a day every day) and now is doing the same for grand-sprog. total spares needed - two sets of replacement motor brushes (15ish mins to swap out), one set of shock dampers (also a 15 min swap) & one motor relay on the PCB requiring a machine strip down and attention from the solder iron (£2.50 in parts to avoid a £250.00 replacement PCB assembly). I've no idea how long the drum bearing will last but I'll wager its replaceable as well.

DWP considers chatbot work coaches as AI-fueled job losses loom

Re: Mass Dickensian destitution inbound?

35 hrs per week of a near pointless activity leaving precious little time to learn any new skill set, unless of course there's a free AI doing the applications, after all it'll be another AI deciding if they've been busy enough. UBI at best is the state subsidising employers, at worst just another name for unemployment benefits.

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

Re: Wait until Facewatch is hacked

You should never need to demonstrate your innocence, it’s a given until proven otherwise.

Spreading unjustified accusations is an offence covered by libel & slander laws, which could be financially suicidal for Facewatch if they cannot prove the crimes attributed to any face in their system.

Accusation of theft* - tell the manager you're quite willing to wait (wherever they confronted you) until plod arrives (while calling plod yourself). Once you are outside their property anything the manager asks you to do such as allowing a search is simply an invitation that can be refused. When (hopefully not if) plod arrives you can let them confirm there’s no stolen property in your possession and ask for a grovelling apology.

*Serious enough to justify a citizens arrest should you attempt to leave, waiting peacefully for plod however basically means they have no reason to ever touch you.

IANAL but I’m getting old and intolerant of tech based BS as well as having worked alongside lawyers who would press the big red button over trivial things.

Re: Ban it

With any luck, one day soon a barrister* will be misidentified as a criminal by this system, The resulting slander case will make interesting reading!

* a high court judge would be even better

Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users

Re: Imagine that.

Quietly ignored as soon as the next money making bandwagon appears.

Has AI found an actually helpful place for blockchain yet?

Microsoft's Sinofsky saw Surface fail coming – then hit up Epstein for advice on exit

Re: Indicted

There has to be a scapegoat to take the blame for expensive product failures, even when it's a 'me-too' lump that just shows how well thought out the Ipad competition was.

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

I'd buy that, but I'm not going into print as to where I'd let it loose....